Holistic vet Dr Clare Middle explores that uncanny link between owners and their pets that brings happiness and health to both.

Did you know that families with pets are likely to be healthier than families who have no animal members? A recent five year research project conducted with thousands of people in Germany and Australia has shown that pet owners are 10 per cent less likely to attend their doctor or a hospital, and more likely to feel generally healthier, than their non-pet owning counterparts. It is estimated that pet owners therefore save the Australian Government $3.86 million a year in health expenditure!

The researchers said that governments should support, not restrict, pet ownership. Local government should encourage ownership of cats and should provide adequate dog exercise areas. Older people, especially, should be encouraged to keep their pets. This way, governments will be saving money long-term.

This evidence then got me thinking about how pets do actually make us more healthy.

Probably the most obvious health benefit from owning a dog is increased physical exercise, which is so important for our health, and so lacking for the average member of most Western societies. It would be even more lacking without all those dog walkers out there in all weathers, carrying out the exercise most recommended by doctors - brisk, regular walking!

And more stillness from our frenetic lives is needed to balance the equation. How often have you stayed reading and relaxing on a cold winter's evening, instead of getting up and cleaning up the kitchen, because you didn't want to disturb the cat asleep on your lap?

Regularly patting of an animal has been proven to lower blood pressure and reduce the need for, and improve the outcome of, cardiac surgery.

They say that love makes the world go around, and there is no greater unconditional, continual source of love than a pet dog. In the Western world, we have become more separate from each other. We tend not to have the extended families and close village living of the past, and for many people, animals are their only close, loved companions. The sociability from strangers that is initiated if one is out for a walk with a dog often just never happens if alone. Maybe while patting an animal, the pet's energy field is "taking away" certain negative energy frequencies from their owners, and thereby pets are lessening the disease of their owner?

Dogs, in an energy sense, (on a Kirlian photograph, which shows the auric or energy field of the dog) appear as mostly heart chakra. Dogs in general, are so unconditionally loving, some would say too loving for their own good, and it is common for dogs to suffer heart disease when older.

In contrast, cats are usually independent and look after their own needs, and heart disease is rare in cats.

It is interesting that the most definitive research involves cardiac patients, in particular, showing improved health due to having companion dogs. We could infer that the frequency of the heart chakra energy is especially transferred between dog and owner.

I can list numerous owners who have diseases surprisingly similar in type to their animals. How often have I heard an owner say, "Oh, but that's what I've got too!" when I diagnose their pet's condition. I have seen owners who have had repeated unsuccessful surgery to their knee, and so has their dog, to the same side knee, and yet others who have severe allergy or chemical sensitivity, and so does their animal. Or both owner and animal are diabetic, both have a back problem at the same vertebral space, both have a thyroid imbalance and on it goes.

Although I have seen so many cases of shared human/pet disease ("Oh, it must run in the family," the owners joke!), these are the extreme cases where the energetic pattern has existed for so long in the household, it has eventually become manifest physically. (This concept is scientifically explainable, according to Einstein's laws of physics, which states that energy and matter at the quantum level are continually interchangeable).